Aussies Test Alcohol’s Brainy Effect : Research: Australians, who do drink a lot, are less likely to abuse other drugs.

The American government wants to find out just how many drinks a day it takes to damage your brain. And the perfect place for the research, it says, is Australia.

Australia’s history has virtually been written with rum since the first English colonial landing.

Though the average Australian’s consumption of booze has lessened in recent years, perhaps partly due to the influx of Asian and Arab immigrants, “booze-ups” are still common.

“We probably have the highest incidence in the world of Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome, which results in brain shrinkage as a result of alcoholism,” said Clive Harper, a professor of neuropathology at the University of Sydney.

Australian drinkers are also less likely than Americans to abuse other drugs, making them ideal for the new three-year University of Sydney study on alcohol-induced brain damage. The research was commissioned by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

“For some reason that nobody has ever satisfactorily explained, Australia has a very high level of brain damage due to alcohol,” agreed Dr. Alex Wodack, a member of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians’ working group on alcohol and health.

Australians still vehemently disagree over how many drinks it takes to damage your health.

“The government says if you are a man you shouldn’t have more than four drinks a day and if you are a woman then you shouldn’t have more than two,” Harper said. “Our new study may challenge these standards.”

“There’s still fairly weak evidence to suggest that if you are healthy and don’t develop liver disease then alcohol won’t do any damage,” Harper added.

Aussies aren’t the world’s heaviest drinkers--they rank about 12th in the world--but they are the top English-speaking country in per capita consumption, another factor that attracted the American funding.

France heads the list, followed by Portugal, Luxembourg, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Denmark. The United States ranks 19th, according to the ranking provided by the Australian Commonwealth Department of Health Statistics.

Backed by a $500,000 NIH grant, the University of Sydney’s pathology department will compare autopsy samples of brain tissue from alcoholics with control groups of teetotalers and moderate drinkers.

The alcoholics studied will have no signs of liver damage or Vitamin B1 deficiency, which has been shown to cause brain damage in other studies. The new research wants to focus on damage caused by alcohol alone.

Up to 60 brains will be dissected and studied, which Harper said would be enough to discover the level at which alcohol begins causing damage.

The individuals studied will likely have been businessmen, engineers, pilots and other people who were alcoholics but led fairly normal, successful lives. Their level of drinking is corroborated by reports from family members.

The university should have no shortage of subjects to study; much of Australian social life revolves around its pubs, bustling smoky parlors where people meet to hoist a few after work.

Liquor has been interwoven into Australian history since the first landing of convicts and their wardens in 1788.

It was the first means of exchange in the early colony, rather than gold or silver. Workers were paid in liquor; goods were bought with it. The first hospitals and churches were built with funds raised from liquor sales.

Several rebellions have been sparked by liquor, including a 1916 rampage by thousands of drunken soldiers who looted saloons, smashed city windows, broke up marketplaces and terrorized all they met.

That led the city to order pubs closed at 6 p.m., a law not repealed until 1955. The early close of pubs created the “6 o’clock swill,” a rush of workingmen into pubs to chug down as much booze as they could in the last hour before final call.

Older Sydney residents vividly recall men weaving out of the pubs at 6 p.m., tumbling onto buses and trains and vomiting over the ferry boat railings into the harbor.